There's a maxim among LEO/firearms instructors about the difference between police and criminals getting shot. "When an officer is shot he is usually found on the ground curled up around his wound. When a criminal is shot, they usually find him three blocks away trying to climb a fence."

I. When you don't see what's visible: The inattentional blindness factor

Experiments mirroring a real-world case that resulted in an officer going to prison for perjury have confirmed that a trick of the mind called inattentional blindness--the failure to see something important that is clearly within your field of view--can occur under stressful circumstances on the street.

The officer's conviction was described in detail in a book called The Invisible Gorilla, which Force Science News reviewed in Transmission #160 [10/8/10. Click here to read it]. He'd been in foot pursuit of a shooting suspect at 0200 in Boston and had run past three fellow officers who were brutally beating a black male. In a public furor that arose over the beating, the officer insisted he didn't see the incident even though he ran right past it. Investigators, prosecutors, and a jury figured he was lying in a classic case of "blue silence" and he was sentenced to 34 months behind bars. They assumed that because he could easily have seen the beating, he must have seen it.

Authors of the book, behavioral scientists Dr. Christopher Chabris of Union College in Schenectady, NY, and Dr. Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois-Champaign, argue that the officer could have experienced inattentional blindness, which occurs when you are so intently focused on a particular subject or task that your mind, without your realizing it, automatically screens out other, unrelated stimuli.

There is a "common but mistaken belief," the authors explain, "that people pay attention to, and notice, more of their visual world than they actually do." (What the researchers call "the illusion of attention" is explored from the perspective of investigating officer-involved shootings in the certification course on Force Science Analysis.) Inattentional blindness has been well documented in laboratory experiments, but some months ago Chabris and a research team that included Simons decided to test it on the street in conditions similar to what the Boston officer had experienced.

First they asked 20 college students one by one to pursue a male confederate for about three minutes while he jogged for about three minutes along a 1,300-ft. route at night in an area lit with streetlamps. While running about 30 ft. behind, each participant was to count the number of times the runner touched his head with either his left or right hand--"a task that required focused attention."

About a third of the way into the chase, in a driveway just off the path, three volunteers staged a fight in which two of them beat the third. These subjects "shouted, grunted, and coughed," the researchers report--and were visible to each pursuing runner for at least 15 seconds before the chaser passed by.

At the end of the route, the researchers asked the subjects how many head-touches they had counted. "Then we asked whether [they] had seen anything unusual along the route and then whether they had seen anyone fighting," the researchers write. Only seven out of 20 (35%) had seen the brawl.

To check if darkness had affected visibility, the team repeated the experiment in daytime with 16 fresh pursuers. Even though in this test the simulated beating was visible for at least 30 seconds (twice as long as at night), 44% of the subjects failed to notice it.

Finally, in a third iteration of the scenario 58 new pursuers were assigned by coin flip either to keep separate counts of head touches by the runner's left and right hands during a daylight run or just to follow the runner without counting. "One hallmark of inattentional blindness is that increasing the effort required by the primary task decreases noticing of unexpected events," the researchers explain.

Sure enough, 58% those with the so-called "high-load condition" of needing to count touches did not see the fight, while 28% of those only chasing (in "no-load condition") failed to do so.

Across the three experiments "with 94 total participants," the research team writes, "a substantial number of subjects failed to notice a three-person fight as they ran past it...both at night and during the day...." Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Institute, who was not involved in these experiments, observes:

"If the stress involved in merely counting head touches provokes this level of inattentional blindness in ordinary people, just imagine how extensive the phenomenon can be when police officers are intently focused on a threat to their lives or on taking custody of a deadly suspect, where the stakes are tremendously higher. Investigators, force reviewers, and jurors need to be educated that the mind can play many tricks under stress and that surprising gaps in observation and memory are not necessarily evidence of evasion or deceit."

He points out that the results of the Chabris team's experiments are consistent with findings by Force Science who with researchers from the United Kingdom tested the effect of cognitive work load on attention and perception as part of a ground-breaking 2010 study of officer performance when exhausted.

"After they were thoroughly stressed," Lewinski explains, "officers were sent into an incident in a room where they were confronted by a very aggressive and hostile assailant who was within reach of a number of dangerous weapons, including an assault rifle, sawed off shotgun, handgun and knife. Most of the officers saw only one of the weapons, even though they were all within reach and constituted potential threats to their lives in that scenario. Shortly after, only 27% of the stressed officers could correctly identify the assailant from a photo line up whereas 54% of the non-exerted officers correctly identified the assailant.

It is very clear that officers in the midst of a dynamic encounter tend to see far less than what the public believes they should.

Click here to read the full study on the Force Science website. For free access to the full report on the Chabris team's experiments, click here.

Is it the position of Reason that children, or pregnant women can't be deadly force threats? I once arrested an elderly gentleman who's criminal history was about 7 feet long when it was printed out on an old dot matrix printer. Look at the pictures of some of your school shooters....

A three-hour standoff ended peacefully Tuesday after law enforcement removed a La Plata County woman from her car near the dam at Vallecito Reservoir.

Suzanne Alsum, 41, faces charges of theft, prohibited use of a weapon and vehicular eluding, said Dan Bender, spokesman for the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office.

The incident began shortly before 9:40 a.m., when someone reported Alsum had stolen a rifle. A deputy who was responding found Alsum’s vehicle headed southbound in the Vallecito area.

The deputy followed the vehicle, and pulled Alsum over near the dam, Bender said.

She was uncooperative and refused to get out of the vehicle, he said. She called her daughter during the traffic stop and threatened to kill herself or have deputies kill her, Bender said.

The Sheriff’s Office SWAT team and the Bayfield Marshal’s Office responded. They placed spike strips in front of and behind her car, and an armored vehicle was brought in.

At some point, Alsum threw a revolver from the car, but deputies were unsure if she had other weapons.

Negotiators counseled the woman through a public-address system because cellphone service at the reservoir is not good, said Undersheriff David Griggs.

“Everything ended peacefully, although we had to break out a couple of windows of her vehicle,” he said.

Deputies eventually reached through the windows, grabbed her hands and took her into custody, Bender said.

The standoff came to an end about 12:30 p.m.

Traffic on County Road 501 was stopped during the standoff.

The woman is suspected of being under the influence of alcohol and medication, Bender said. She was taken to Mercy Regional Medical Center, where she was in critical condition Tuesday night as a result of a possible overdose, Bender said.

A shocking video has just been released by the Middlefield, OH police department that shows a madman unloading on officers with an AK-47 during a routine traffic stop. The motive behind the madman’s actions, which happened back in March, still remains a mystery.

We are here today to commemorate officers that have died in the line of duty. Over to my left you see the statue with eight gold stars, one for each Tucson Police Officer who has died in the line of duty since the department began. It is only by the grace of God, the bravery of my fellow officers and the skill of the medical staff at University Medical Center, that there are not nine stars. On November 18, 2012 I was shot in the head after responding to a burglary call. This has given me a new perspective on memorial services and the commemoration of fallen officers. It has made me reflect on several aspects of my life and career. The first of these is why do I do this job?

This I found was one of the hardest questions to answer, not that it should be a very difficult question to answer, but it was. The standard answers came to mind. They were, of course, that it is a good job that has taken care of the financial needs of my family. It is a necessary job that needs to be done by dedicated people with honor and integrity. Also that the world is full of evil people and officers are needed to keep the public safe. These were certainly good enough answers when I started in December of 2000, However I found that it did not end there.

Over the years I found that I came to depend on the camaraderie of my fellow officers and that I began to trust them absolutely on calls. Once, while checking an apartment for an auto theft suspect I went down a hall and had a choice of going left to clear the bathroom or right to check a closet. I checked the door on the left but the suspect was found on the right in the closet. This never bothered me at all because the officer who was with me clearing the apartment had him covered even before I knew the suspect was there. You learn to rely on those you work with to a degree you never thought possible. This is just a simple example of the trust that you develop with the officers you work with. I have cleared countless buildings and residences over the last twelve years and I have found that the trust extends to every officer I work with. I know the training we have received and I am confident in our ability to work together on a call, be it something as simple as a burglary call to the more complex armed robberies, man with a gun or violent domestic situations.

After I was shot the bravery, teamwork and instant decision making of four members of my squad showed me just how much I could rely on them. Dain Salisbury and David Danielson dragged me to a safe area while Josh Reeder provided cover with his rifle and brought his medical kit, all while remaining exposed to the shooter. Roland Gutierrez took over incident command and coordinated the response and the initial search for the suspect. Even though I had been shot in the head I was well aware of what was going on for the first several minutes. Not once during that time was I worried about my safety after the initial injury. The officers that were there gave me that much confidence in their actions that I did not have to worry about what was going to happen next, even though the stubborn part of me wanted to direct the response myself until Dain wisely took my radio from me.

While I was fortunate, these stars to my left indicate that this is not always the outcome we could hope for. While there are eight stars on the memorial, there are two that affected me personally. On May 26, 2003, I was at 8 W. Grant with my Sergeant and two other officers when my Sergeant looked at me and said, “Team 3 has a 10-99 (officer needs emergency assistance). Switch over to 3 and go.” I switched frequencies and heard the alert tone and was directed to an address in Team 3. When I got there I found a patrol car parked but no officer was around it. The bystanders in the small apartment complex were not very helpful so I checked the computer in the car to see who it belonged to. The name at the top of the screen said Patrick Hardesty. Inside his vehicle, sitting on the passenger seat was his paperwork and equipment bag, which he loaded into his car every day in preparation for work with every expectation that he would be unloading it at the end of his shift. His end of shift came about 100 yards from his patrol car, where he was shot and killed by the suspect of a simple hit and run accident. His patrol car was driven back to the station where I was told it sat for a long time before another officer could bring himself to drive it on patrol again.

On June 2, 2008, I was at home and I received a call from one of my friends. He told me that Eric Hite had been killed, ambushed during a pursuit. Eric was killed while pursuing a subject who had already shot and wounded two Pima County Deputies. Eric well knew the danger that he was in, yet with complete dedication for the safety of the public and his fellow officers and with a remarkable degree of bravery he continued the pursuit until he turned that fatal corner onto Tomahawk Trail.

While I never had the opportunity to meet or work directly with either officer, I feel that I know them, because I know the dedication each had for their fellow officers and the community they served. They were both well liked by their peers and had very good reputations for being hardworking, fair and honest. They exemplified integrity and dedication.

I found myself thinking a lot about them as I was preparing for this ceremony. I came to the realization that while we commemorate the officers that were lost, I think that we also need to recognize and keep in mind the families that they left behind. A few seconds after I fell to the ground on November 18 I took my hand from my head, saw the blood covering it and I began to pray. I prayed for my family, that they would be taken care of and, being selfish, a short word for myself, asking for forgiveness, because I was convinced that I was not going to survive. As the minutes passed I felt my awareness diminishing, so I focused on God and my family, and I am convinced that both Eric and Patrick did the same.

Recently I had the opportunity to read the email updates that my wife sent out to friends and family after I was shot. Among the medical updates and the hope that she expressed I could get a sense of the pain, anguish and anger that she was feeling. I also got a sense of the strength of character it takes to be the spouse of a law enforcement officer. It has been portrayed in numerous movies and television shows, the early morning knock on the door, well before the spouse should be home. This happened to my wife a little after 6 AM. She answered the door and found an officer and a Sergeant standing there, telling her that she needed to get dressed and come with them to the hospital because I had been injured. The instant confusion, with a mind struggling to catch up with our new reality. She could have easily been overwhelmed by the situation and could have given in to despair. This never happened. She remained calm, strong and determined to be there for us when I and our children needed her the most. This continued, with the media attention, the constant doctor consultations and the daily visits to my room. During her visits I received nothing but encouragement from her, as she stared down at her husband who was hooked up to IV’s, monitors and who had about 20% of his skull removed due to his brain swelling. She endured seeing her husband who was not lucid for more than a few minutes a day that first week. Also a husband who was in constant severe pain for three months, until the reconstructive surgery was performed. Through all of this she continued to stay positive and focused on what was important to her, the welfare of her family. I often think that her strength, courage and determination far exceed my own.

I also think of my children, and the complete upheaval this assault caused in their own lives. My oldest, Jordan, was finishing his first semester at the UofA while my daughter, Erin was in her first year of high school. This situation is not unique. Each of these eight officers had a family who went through an even greater upheaval than mine. They left behind wives and children whose lives were decimated in an instant. Dad is always supposed to be there. How do they carry on and rebuild their lives? For each family it is different, although some facts are the same. The one thing that I know we can depend on is the large extended family of our agencies. The support that my family received from the Tucson Police Department was incredible. From the officers assigned to my room, the officers who looked after my family and to those few who spent so much of their time sitting in my room, night after night, waking me up when the respirator alarm went off, telling me to breathe again. Their only concern was for me and my family’s welfare. My wife told me that two officers in particular were constantly attending to her and her needs, encouraging her to eat, giving whatever support they could think to offer. For these two, Dan Roberts and Frank Hanson, my gratitude is more than I can express.

I have also found that the support that families receive is not limited to the incident in question. It exceeds this short period of time and continues to this day. It is not the overpowering presence of the first few weeks, but it is the continued support, the continued phone calls and visits just to check on us and to see if we needed anything. I am also happy to say that this is not limited to what happened to me. After I was promoted in February 2012 I was briefly assigned to Operations Division East. On two separate occasions two training Sergeants made sure I knew where the Hite household was located. They encourage their officers to drive past occasionally just to make sure it is quiet, that nothing is going on. This is not done to have an oppressive police presence in that neighborhood, but as a reminder that the Hite family is still one of our own.

A few weeks ago I was at yet another doctor appointment when the doctor asked me if I was going to go back to work. I answered, “Of course” almost before he finished the question.

The look on his face was one of complete puzzlement, and then he asked, “Why?” That one threw me for a second, until I answered, “Because I must.” I must, because my extended family of officers needs me as much as I need them. I must, because it is what I do, it is what I am. I can return to full duty confident that no matter what happens, there is never any need to be afraid, because you are never alone, and even if the worst should happen, your families will be looked after.

We are here to commemorate these eight fallen TPD officers as well as to remember those officers across the country who have sacrificed everything for their families and their communities. There are currently eight stars on the TPD memorial, but there could easily been nine, or even twelve if the shooter in my incident continued to fire and target the officers who were assisting me. That there are only eight is a tribute to them and their dedication and skill.

However, we all know that eight stars will not be the end of the memorial. In time, there will be more, although we all pray that these instances will be rare. Every law enforcement officer in every agency knows that another officer or deputy will lose his life in the line of duty and it may even be their own. Yet we accept this and continue to go forth onto the streets with the examples set by Eric Hite, Patrick Hardesty, Jeffrey Ross, James Smith, Barry Headricks, Robert Cummins William Katzenstein and WIlliam Elliot always there as a reminder of how the job is to be done, with courage, honor and integrity.

"No, no, no!"... The anatomy of a "classic" blue-on-blue shootingPart 1 of a 2-part series

Editor's note: Out of respect and sympathy for the officers involved in this tragic incident and in admiration for the agency's courage in pursuing learning points that will help keep other officers safe, we have chosen to remove the actual names of the agents and the department associated with this event.

When Agt. DB arrived at the "shots-fired" scene that cold November Friday, long after some 30 other officers had already responded, he probably knew the least of any of them about the circumstances he was walking into, according to the district attorney's after-action assessment of the situation. When he finally left, he carried the heaviest burden an LEO can suffer: He'd killed one of his own.

The many factors forming the tragic context of his firing a .223 round from his AR-15 into the head of Agt. JD are detailed in an unsparing report of the incident issued recently by the officers' agency. These include, among other things:

• the failure of supervisory personnel to take command of a scene described as "chaotic;" • poor communication regarding deployment and positioning of boots on the ground; • ineffective use of air support; • a breakdown in "buddy system" precautions; and • the insidious influence of powerful human-performance elements such as fatigue, reaction time, and perceptions under stress.

The 144-page report, commissioned by Department Chief KP, is the work of an independent Incident Review Board with no connection to departments involved in the shooting or to official investigations of it.

This blue-ribbon panel included Chief Louis Dekmar of LaGrange, GA, chair of the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies; Capt. Terry Brown of the Aurora (CO) PD; Bob Evans, the supervisory special agent who oversees investigative and operational activity for the FBI in Wyoming; Sgt. Michael Harding of the Los Angeles County (CA) SD's Tactics and Survival Training Unit; and Special Projects Director Bill Spence of the Force Science Institute.

Beginning last January, the group pored over thousands of pages of documentation about what happened, ranging from interview transcripts, crime-scene photos, and radio transmissions to investigative reports, policies, and payroll records. With commendation to the Department for "displaying the courage to undergo such critical scrutiny," the panel focused "not upon what went right [but] upon what went wrong, how, and why," in the hope that their findings might prevent another blue-on-blue catastrophe in the future.

Says FSI's executive director Dr. Bill Lewinski, "The candor and transparency represented by this report are exceptional among law enforcement agencies. By encouraging this level of examination, the Department not only shows its dedication to improving the safety of its own officers but also its determination to help all others in this profession who can learn from this tragic event."

In this 2-part series, Force Science News presents some of the Board's core discoveries, with particular emphasis on the physiological and psychological factors that may have led to the fateful deadly force decision that ended JD's life at age 35.

"The human factors involved are by no means unique to this agency," Lewinski says. "This is, in fact, a classic blue-on-blue, mistaken-identity shooting with universal ingredients that could occur anywhere. It's important to study for the understanding it can bring to how these devastating events evolve and the lessons they leave in their wake."

First, the shooting itself, the first officer fatality in the department's history. (For clarification, please note that on this department all personnel of officer rank are referred to as agents.)

From "loud party" to "shots fired"

Shortly after 0100 hours on Nov. 9, 2012, Agt. JD, a native of the United Kingdom with nearly seven years on the force, and another officer were dispatched to a residential neighborhood in response to a "loud party" complaint.

Both men had volunteered to work an overtime patrol shift to fill in for officers who had called in sick. JD had already logged in 10 hours on his regular shift plus four hours of extra duty prior to that before he began his extended tour.

As the agents exited their units and began walking toward the alleged disturbance, they heard gunshots coming from somewhere in the neighborhood. They couldn't pinpoint the location, but as they checked the area, more shots rang out. Soon dispatch was receiving "numerous calls from concerned citizens" about gunfire. Multiple officers, including some from nearby jurisdictions, raced into the area.

As the first Department sergeant to arrive made her way on foot down one street with a covey of officers in search of the shooting site, she "saw a figure step out" onto the patio of a nearby residence, then "saw a muzzle flash and heard a gunshot" that caused her to duck behind a large tree for cover. The shooter, too indistinct in the darkness to yield a detailed description, ducked back inside.

Dispatch, running the address, advised that an occupant of that house was a "known gang member" with prior weapons charges and other violent offenses. Now cops flooded the area and somewhat of a perimeter informally fell into place. JD and another agent, armed respectively with a Glock 17 and a shotgun, took a position behind a high wooden privacy fence that enclosed the backyard of the "target" house.

They tried to establish a visual on the yard through cracks between the slats or by wobbling on a metal extension ladder that was leaned on its side against the fence. But the battery in JD's flashlight was dying and the light on the other agent's shotgun was of limited scope. For the most part, their environs were "pitch black." In JD's words via radio to his sergeant, "It's not a great spot."

A pit bull problem

At 0231 a second Department sergeant at the scene, a SWAT negotiator, began telephoning into the residence. Eventually a woman answered. She denied that she, her boyfriend, or a visiting male--the only occupants, she insisted--had fired any guns. They agreed to come out "with nothing in their hands" and to follow commands. By 0237 the three, all Hispanics, were proned out, handcuffed, and arrested, still proclaiming their innocence. "None were found to have any weapons in their possession," the DA later noted. However, the boyfriend was "extremely intoxicated and belligerent." And the woman alternated between acting "cagey" and treating everything "as a joke." The negotiator was skeptical of her proclaimed truthfulness.

Considering that a known offender with gang ties was associated with the residence, the sergeants decided that the place "had to be cleared."

One problem: the woman warned that there were three unrestrained pit bulls inside. And that the sergeants believed.

One of them called for someone at the police station to bring some catch poles to the scene.

Agt. DB took the call. He'd been casually catching bits and pieces of radio traffic from the scene as he finished up booking a DUI arrestee. A firearms instructor and assistant SWAT team leader, 35-year-old DB, like JD, was working an overtime shift after completing his regular 10-hour stint. At about 0300, he grabbed a couple of poles and some mirrors and headed out to the cop-saturated scene.

Meanwhile, supervisors on scene decided additional personnel were needed to search the house. The agent who had buddied up with JD behind the fence volunteered to help out. When he left the fence line, taking the shotgun with him, JD lost his closest contact at the scene and, his sergeant later admitted, she "didn't actually check to make sure that somebody else" was with him or that his location was clearly communicated to other responders.

Alone in the dark, the Review Board reports, JD's "hands were occupied with handling both a [fading] flashlight and his handgun," making it "difficult to handle his radio as well. Still worse, he was standing in a precarious position, trying to see over a fence while standing on the edge of a ladder."

An ill-fated plan unfolds

Arriving at the scene, DB quickly joined a handful of officers who had established a beachhead in the living room of the target house. In a "brief conversation," they told him about the dogs and the fact that they'd recovered a magazine for a .45-cal. Pistol, but no gun, inside the house, deepening their conviction that an armed subject was still at large. There was no discussion about anyone watching the backyard or being in any danger zone outside the dwelling. DB would state later that he didn't even know JD was at the scene.

One loose pit bull was captured with a catch pole and penned in a bathroom. At least one more dog could be heard behind a closed door down a narrow hallway, and some sounds of movement suggested that a human being might be in that room, too. That and the dog's chilling snarls quickly provoked a change of plans. Instead of trying to snare the animal(s) in the cramped confines of the passageway while burdened with "heavy and cumbersome" protective gear, including a shield, it seemed to make better sense to clear the remainder of the house from the outside. A team of three--DB, another agent, and the sergeant/negotiator--would move around the exterior, breaking and raking windows to get a visual into each room in search of the suspect they believed may still be free.

Just after 0330 with DB in the lead, the trio exited the house into a carport and from there planned to move into the dark backyard. As DB cautiously stepped out, scanning from left to right, he heard a male voice from the darkness softly say "Hey!," as if trying to get his attention in a "conversational tone."

"The person continued to speak," DB said later, but DB "could not make out any words [he] was saying" because the voice "sounded slurred, as if the individual was drunk." DB immediately activated the light on his rifle and directed it and his full attention toward the voice.

At the top of the privacy fence at the back of the yard, he saw what looked like a "Hispanic male with a shaved head." Only part of the man's head and his hands were visible. The right hand gripped "a black, semi-automatic-pistol."

"Police!" DB yelled. "Drop the gun! Drop the gun!"

Initially the weapon had been angled "down and out" in the direction of DB's feet. But now "the individual started to raise the gun," targeting him, DB thought, "in order to shoot" him.

DB was sighting the optic on his rifle on the man's head. When he "saw the gun come up," he fired. Then as he retreated backward toward cover, he "transitioned down" to where the man's torso would have been on the other side of the fence and fired five more rounds. His target "fell back" out of sight.

After DB performed a tactical reload, the team of three moved out to search behind the fence, with DB trailing this time. Behind the barrier, they found the male's body, lying face up with the heels resting on a ladder that was leaning on its side against the fence.

The other agent was the first to reach the form. DB heard him exclaim, "No, no, no!" At first DB thought the agent had seen "movement from the suspect and was giving him commands to not move." But then DB got closer.

First he saw a PD patch on the body's jacket. And then he saw the face of a friend and fellow officer, Agt. JD, an entry wound under his left eye where DB's first round had crashed into his skull. "It did not appear," DB said later, "that there was any chance he was alive."

Near the body, which was dressed in a police uniform, was JD's Glock pistol and his Streamlight Stinger that was not illuminated. His badge was pinned to his shirt over his soft body armor.

DB of course was devastated. He thrust his rifle at the other agent. "Take it!" he said. "I don't want it any more!" Together the two of them prayed as DB was led from the scene.

Twice in the days that followed, an interview scheduled with investigators had to be delayed because he was so distraught. When he was finally able to speak at length, he said he'd replayed the shooting in his mind "thousands of times" and still did not recognize that the man poking his head above the fence was JD. JD's close-cropped hair might have made him appear bald, but DB said he had no idea why he thought the man at the fence looked Hispanic. Like so much else, it was something he just couldn't explain.

The suspect who wasn't there

As it turned out, there was no suspect at large in those pre-dawn hours. The three people who walked out empty-handed were the only occupants of the house. In her formal statement, the female arrestee said her boyfriend had repeatedly fired shots from several guns after he and their visitor arrived home from a night of heavy drinking. Under questioning, the boyfriend admitted shooting randomly because he "just wanted to hear the gunfire." The guns had then been hidden in a dog food bin before the three surrendered.

About three months later, after extensively reviewing the night's events, the District Atty. announced that there was "no indication whatsoever" that DB's killing of his fellow officer was intentional. "This is truly a tragedy," he said, "but not an incident for which anyone should be charged criminally."

"For many departments," says Dr. Lewinski, "that would have closed out the case. To its credit, this agency wanted to dig even deeper for lessons to be learned." NEXT: What the Review Board reported about operational shortcomings and human performance issues that made this blue-on-blue calamity "almost predetermined."

Rise of the Warrior CopIs it time to reconsider the militarization of American policing?By RADLEY BALKO

On Jan. 4 of last year, a local narcotics strike force conducted a raid on the Ogden, Utah, home of Matthew David Stewart at 8:40 p.m. The 12 officers were acting on a tip from Mr. Stewart's former girlfriend, who said that he was growing marijuana in his basement. Mr. Stewart awoke, naked, to the sound of a battering ram taking down his door. Thinking that he was being invaded by criminals, as he later claimed, he grabbed his 9-millimeter Beretta pistol.[image] Sean McCabe

The police say that they knocked and identified themselves, though Mr. Stewart and his neighbors said they heard no such announcement. Mr. Stewart fired 31 rounds, the police more than 250. Six of the officers were wounded, and Officer Jared Francom was killed. Mr. Stewart himself was shot twice before he was arrested. He was charged with several crimes, including the murder of Officer Francom.

The police found 16 small marijuana plants in Mr. Stewart's basement. There was no evidence that Mr. Stewart, a U.S. military veteran with no prior criminal record, was selling marijuana. Mr. Stewart's father said that his son suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and may have smoked the marijuana to self-medicate.

Early this year, the Ogden city council heard complaints from dozens of citizens about the way drug warrants are served in the city. As for Mr. Stewart, his trial was scheduled for next April, and prosecutors were seeking the death penalty. But after losing a hearing last May on the legality of the search warrant, Mr. Stewart hanged himself in his jail cell.

The police tactics at issue in the Stewart case are no anomaly. Since the 1960s, in response to a range of perceived threats, law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier. Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment—from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers—American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene: the warrior cop—armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.

The acronym SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics. Such police units are trained in methods similar to those used by the special forces in the military. They learn to break into homes with battering rams and to use incendiary devices called flashbang grenades, which are designed to blind and deafen anyone nearby. Their usual aim is to "clear" a building—that is, to remove any threats and distractions (including pets) and to subdue the occupants as quickly as possible.

The country's first official SWAT team started in the late 1960s in Los Angeles. By 1975, there were approximately 500 such units. Today, there are thousands. According to surveys conducted by the criminologist Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University, just 13% of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team in 1983. By 2005, the figure was up to 80%.

The number of raids conducted by SWAT-like police units has grown accordingly. In the 1970s, there were just a few hundred a year; by the early 1980s, there were some 3,000 a year. In 2005 (the last year for which Dr. Kraska collected data), there were approximately 50,000 raids.

A number of federal agencies also now have their own SWAT teams, including the Fish & Wildlife Service, NASA, the Consumer Products Safety Commission and the Department of the Interior. In 2011, the Department of Education's SWAT team bungled a raid on a woman who was initially reported to be under investigation for not paying her student loans, though the agency later said she was suspected of defrauding the federal student loan program.

The details of the case aside, the story generated headlines because of the revelation that the Department of Education had such a unit. None of these federal departments has responded to my requests for information about why they consider such high-powered military-style teams necessary.

Americans have long been wary of using the military for domestic policing. Concerns about potential abuse date back to the creation of the Constitution, when the founders worried about standing armies and the intimidation of the people at large by an overzealous executive, who might choose to follow the unhappy precedents set by Europe's emperors and monarchs.

The idea for the first SWAT team in Los Angeles arose during the domestic strife and civil unrest of the mid-1960s. Daryl Gates, then an inspector with the Los Angeles Police Department, had grown frustrated with his department's inability to respond effectively to incidents like the 1965 Watts riots. So his thoughts turned to the military. He was drawn in particular to Marine Special Forces and began to envision an elite group of police officers who could respond in a similar manner to dangerous domestic disturbances.

Mr. Gates initially had difficulty getting his idea accepted. Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker thought the concept risked a breach in the divide between the military and law enforcement. But with the arrival of a new chief, Thomas Reddin, in 1966, Mr. Gates got the green light to start training a unit. By 1969, his SWAT team was ready for its maiden raid against a holdout cell of the Black Panthers.

At about the same time, President Richard Nixon was declaring war on drugs. Among the new, tough-minded law-enforcement measures included in this campaign was the no-knock raid—a policy that allowed drug cops to break into homes without the traditional knock and announcement. After fierce debate, Congress passed a bill authorizing no-knock raids for federal narcotics agents in 1970.

Over the next several years, stories emerged of federal agents breaking down the doors of private homes (often without a warrant) and terrorizing innocent citizens and families. Congress repealed the no-knock law in 1974, but the policy would soon make a comeback (without congressional authorization).

During the Reagan administration, SWAT-team methods converged with the drug war. By the end of the 1980s, joint task forces brought together police officers and soldiers for drug interdiction. National Guard helicopters and U-2 spy planes flew the California skies in search of marijuana plants. When suspects were identified, battle-clad troops from the National Guard, the DEA and other federal and local law enforcement agencies would swoop in to eradicate the plants and capture the people growing them.

Advocates of these tactics said that drug dealers were acquiring ever bigger weapons and the police needed to stay a step ahead in the arms race. There were indeed a few high-profile incidents in which police were outgunned, but no data exist suggesting that it was a widespread problem. A study done in 1991 by the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute found that less than one-eighth of 1% of homicides in the U.S. were committed with a military-grade weapon. Subsequent studies by the Justice Department in 1995 and the National Institute for Justice in 2004 came to similar conclusions: The overwhelming majority of serious crimes are committed with handguns, and not particularly powerful ones.

The new century brought the war on terror and, with it, new rationales and new resources for militarizing police forces. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Department of Homeland Security has handed out $35 billion in grants since its creation in 2002, with much of the money going to purchase military gear such as armored personnel carriers. In 2011 alone, a Pentagon program for bolstering the capabilities of local law enforcement gave away $500 million of equipment, an all-time high.

The past decade also has seen an alarming degree of mission creep for U.S. SWAT teams. When the craze for poker kicked into high gear, a number of police departments responded by deploying SWAT teams to raid games in garages, basements and VFW halls where illegal gambling was suspected. According to news reports and conversations with poker organizations, there have been dozens of these raids, in cities such as Baltimore, Charleston, S.C., and Dallas.

In 2006, 38-year-old optometrist Sal Culosi was shot and killed by a Fairfax County, Va., SWAT officer. The investigation began when an undercover detective overheard Mr. Culosi wagering on college football games with some buddies at a bar. The department sent a SWAT team after Mr. Culosi, who had no prior criminal record or any history of violence. As the SWAT team descended, one officer fired a single bullet that pierced Mr. Culosi's heart. The police say that the shot was an accident. Mr. Culosi's family suspects the officer saw Mr. Culosi reaching for his cellphone and thought he had a gun.

Assault-style raids have even been used in recent years to enforce regulatory law. Armed federal agents from the Fish & Wildlife Service raided the floor of the Gibson Guitar factory in Nashville in 2009, on suspicion of using hardwoods that had been illegally harvested in Madagascar. Gibson settled in 2012, paying a $300,000 fine and admitting to violating the Lacey Act. In 2010, the police department in New Haven, Conn., sent its SWAT team to raid a bar where police believed there was underage drinking. For sheer absurdity, it is hard to beat the 2006 story about the Tibetan monks who had overstayed their visas while visiting America on a peace mission. In Iowa, the hapless holy men were apprehended by a SWAT team in full gear.

Unfortunately, the activities of aggressive, heavily armed SWAT units often result in needless bloodshed: Innocent bystanders have lost their lives and so, too, have police officers who were thought to be assailants and were fired on, as (allegedly) in the case of Matthew David Stewart.

In my own research, I have collected over 50 examples in which innocent people were killed in raids to enforce warrants for crimes that are either nonviolent or consensual (that is, crimes such as drug use or gambling, in which all parties participate voluntarily). These victims were bystanders, or the police later found no evidence of the crime for which the victim was being investigated. They include Katherine Johnston, a 92-year-old woman killed by an Atlanta narcotics team acting on a bad tip from an informant in 2006; Alberto Sepulveda, an 11-year-old accidentally shot by a California SWAT officer during a 2000 drug raid; and Eurie Stamps, killed in a 2011 raid on his home in Framingham, Mass., when an officer says his gun mistakenly discharged. Mr. Stamps wasn't a suspect in the investigation.

What would it take to dial back such excessive police measures? The obvious place to start would be ending the federal grants that encourage police forces to acquire gear that is more appropriate for the battlefield. Beyond that, it is crucial to change the culture of militarization in American law enforcement.

Consider today's police recruitment videos (widely available on YouTube), which often feature cops rappelling from helicopters, shooting big guns, kicking down doors and tackling suspects. Such campaigns embody an American policing culture that has become too isolated, confrontational and militaristic, and they tend to attract recruits for the wrong reasons.

If you browse online police discussion boards, or chat with younger cops today, you will often encounter some version of the phrase, "Whatever I need to do to get home safe." It is a sentiment that suggests that every interaction with a citizen may be the officer's last. Nor does it help when political leaders lend support to this militaristic self-image, as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg did in 2011 by declaring, "I have my own army in the NYPD—the seventh largest army in the world."

The motivation of the average American cop should not focus on just making it to the end of his shift. The LAPD may have given us the first SWAT team, but its motto is still exactly the right ideal for American police officers: To protect and serve.

SWAT teams have their place, of course, but they should be saved for those relatively rare situations when police-initiated violence is the only hope to prevent the loss of life. They certainly have no place as modern-day vice squads.

Many longtime and retired law-enforcement officers have told me of their worry that the trend toward militarization is too far gone. Those who think there is still a chance at reform tend to embrace the idea of community policing, an approach that depends more on civil society than on brute force.

In this very different view of policing, cops walk beats, interact with citizens and consider themselves part of the neighborhoods they patrol—and therefore have a stake in those communities. It's all about a baton-twirling "Officer Friendly" rather than a Taser-toting RoboCop.

Mr. Balko is the author of "Rise of the Warrior Cop," published this month by PublicAffairs.

Today the virtual war zone that was New York City from the 1970s through the early '90s is a distant memory—apparently too distant. Now that the Big Apple is the safest major U.S. city, the metropolitan establishment is reverting to its old ways as it bids to reverse the anticrime reforms of Mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

As a gold watch for the departing Mr. Bloomberg, the city council passed two bills that would roll back the critical "stop, question and frisk" police program, with veto-proof majorities. On Tuesday he vetoed them anyway. But despite heavy pressure from voices of sanity including Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and the police union, no council member has so far recanted.

Unless at least one or more does, the results could be "chaotic, dangerous and even deadly for our police officers and for our city," as Mayor Mike put it. In this case he's right.

One bill creates an inspector general to oversee the NYPD. That would be on top of the current five district attorneys, two federal prosecutors, the state attorney general, three review bureaucracies and . . . voters, who elect a mayor who chooses a police commissioner. The second bill opens the courts to individuals who believe they were stopped for "bias-based" reasons. Get ready for a deluge of liberal lawsuits backed by zero substance.

Three federal class-action lawsuits are already pending that argue the police are guilty of "deliberate indifference" to racial discrimination and therefore stop and frisk is illegal under the state constitution. The presiding judge, Shira Scheindlin, who is known for her anti-police bent, may appoint yet another inspector general to second-guess the judgment of officers on the street.

This anti-anticrime campaign claims that minorities are disproportionately targeted: Over 85% of those stopped were black or Latino, despite making up 52% of the city population. But those numbers are undercounts relative to crime rates: For instance, 90% of murder suspects and 97% of shooting suspects are black or Latino.

More important is the fact that these programs are working, and on behalf of the people that the racial grievance lobby claims to be protecting. In 1990, some 2,245 people were murdered in the city. Last year there were 417 murders, an all-time low due to be outdone this year. All crime has dropped by 34% in Mr. Bloomberg's nearly 12-year tenure.

This is harder to experience from the vantage point of Central Park West. But 79% of the decline in homicide victims since the 1990s have been black or Latino. Had rates stayed the same, the city would have buried over 30,000 more minority individuals. Under the pre-Giuliani policies that crippled urban neighborhoods, the police were accused of not caring. Now that the resources of a majority-minority police force are pouring in, the police are somehow racist. Which is it?

Don't expect an answer from the doctrinaire mediocrities of the Democratic mayoral field as cops try to prevent another Chicago. But they shouldn't be so sure that harming successful police methods is a winning political strategy, at least in the long run. New Yorkers who are now kept safe by policies like stop and frisk may be less eager than city council members to relive 1990.

When Justice Department officials announced the results of a two-year investigation into civil rights violations at the Miami Police Department this month, it was the 11th time in two years that the federal government had put a local law enforcement agency on notice that it must change its ways or face a federal lawsuit.Enlarge This ImageKurt Wilson/Missoulian

Mayor John Engen, left, of Missoula, Mont., and the police chief, Mark Muir, second from left, listened last year as Thomas E. Perez, an assistant attorney general, described a federal investigation into the city’s handling of sexual assault cases.

Cities from New Orleans and Seattle to Missoula, Mont., and East Haven, Conn., are grappling with similar federally mandated changes after investigations into their police departments. In Miami, the Justice Department found a pattern of the use of excessive force — in an eight-month period in 2011, eight young black men were shot and killed by the police. This month, the Justice Department announced a sweeping settlement forcing Puerto Rico to change 11 areas of policing, including the use of excessive force, searches, stops and the handling of domestic violence. It was, the department said, “among the most extensive agreements ever obtained.”

Civil rights violations by police departments have been subject to investigation by the federal government since 1994, when Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. But federal intervention has become far more common and much broader in scope under the Obama administration, a development proudly highlighted on the Justice Department’s Web site.

During Mr. Obama’s first term, the department initiated 15 investigations into troubled law enforcement agencies, almost twice the number carried out in the last four years of the Bush administration. While early investigations focused narrowly on the use of excessive force and racial profiling, recent inquiries have taken on a host of other issues, including the treatment of the mentally ill, the handling of sexual assault cases and unconscious bias of officers.

Last year, the department extended its purview further, announcing its intention to investigate a district attorney’s office over the handling of sexual assault cases. The Missoula County attorney, Fred Van Valkenburg, has so far declined to cooperate, arguing that under state law, the Justice Department has no standing to investigate his office.

“In my mind, these people have never run into somebody who told them ‘no,’ ” Mr. Van Valkenburg told an audience at a City Club Missoula luncheon in June. The National District Attorneys Association has sent a letter objecting to the investigation to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

“Justice Department litigation has really set a national standard,” said Samuel Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and the author of “The New World of Police Accountability.” He said the investigations — and the resulting settlements, known as consent decrees — send a message to police departments that “there are some minimal things you have to do to be professional, and here are the things you need to do in order to achieve that.”

And some police officials whose departments have been the target of Justice Department investigators say the consent decree that resulted was beneficial. “I think they’re extremely effective,” said Robert McNeilly, a former chief of the Pittsburgh Police Department, the first agency to enter into a consent decree after the 1994 law was passed. To comply with the decree, the department increased accountability and increased training. Among other things, it instituted an early warning system to identify officers who were at high risk of using excessive force.

But the federal intervention has also caused frustration among some police chiefs, who say the government should work to find a cheaper and more efficient process. Consent decrees, they say, can drag on for years and impose huge cost burdens on cities that are least able to afford them.

In Detroit, which declared bankruptcy on July 18, a consent decree imposed to correct a range of serious problems including the use of excessive force, false arrest, illegal detention and failures in investigation and training is in its 11th year. In New Orleans, city officials asked the Justice Department to come in but are now contesting the consent decree, saying its measures are too expensive to carry out.

“We don’t disagree with the objectives at all,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an organization based in Washington that conducts research on policing and recently issued a report on federal civil rights investigations into police departments. “What we find issue with is the mechanics of the process.”

In addition to cost, the issues addressed in the forum’s report included concerns that standards for compliance set by the Justice Department were sometimes unreasonably high, 95 percent in some instances; that the process was often adversarial rather than collaborative; and that there was a lack of measures to tell whether the federal intervention was effective.

Some police chiefs also complained that the Justice Department, in its eagerness to promote best practices in new areas, in some cases investigated police departments that, their chiefs argued, were not clearly in violation of constitutional standards. =====================================================

In Montana, federal investigators found that the Missoula Police Department “discriminates against women in its response to sexual assault,” according to the letter of findings issued by the Justice Department. But Mark Muir, Missoula’s police chief, contended that the government had offered no objective evidence that his department had met the criteria for discrimination set by the courts, or even that Missoula’s record in handling sexual assault cases was worse than that of other comparable cities.

“I’ve got to tell you, Missoula, Montana, is not one of the worst of the worst in any respect,” Chief Muir said. But, he said, once a police department has been singled out by the Justice Department, “they pay a huge price in terms of their reputation and their effectiveness in the community.”

In some cases, consent decrees can also make it more difficult for departments to focus on fighting crime, some chiefs said. William J. Bratton, who as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department from 2002 to 2009 steered it through seven years of a 13-year consent decree, says he has no doubt that in some cases intervention by the Justice Department is necessary.

“The state of American policing is not where it should be,” Mr. Bratton said. But, he continued, “there is a tension, and it is felt by police chiefs, between the constitutional policing that we’re obligated to provide to operate within the law and the obligation to provide public safety in terms of controlling crime and disorder.”

The Los Angeles department has won praise for its transformation into a model police agency under the consent decree, which was entered into after the Justice Department found pervasive corruption in the Rampart community division. But other cities, with fewer resources and inconsistent leadership, might not fare as well, Mr. Bratton said.

He and other police chiefs also expressed concern about the monitors who oversee the enforcement of settlements, noting that monitoring has in itself become a kind of cottage industry. Monitors, either individuals or firms, who submit proposals and are chosen by a federal judge, are paid as long as a consent decree continues, amounting to sums that can run into the millions of dollars. As a result, critics say, they have little incentive to bring the process to a speedy close.

Sheryl Robinson Wood, a lawyer appointed in 2003 to oversee Detroit’s compliance with its consent decree, resigned in 2009 after it was disclosed that she was having an affair with the mayor at the time, Kwame M. Kilpatrick. The city sued to recover the $10 million it had paid Ms. Robinson Wood and her employers, Kroll International and two law firms. At the time of her resignation, the Police Department was only in 36 percent compliance with the decree.

Roy L. Austin Jr., the deputy assistant attorney general who supervises the special litigation office in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said the costs of civil lawsuits are also high to cities. The Justice Department, he said, does not take a one-size-fits-all approach to its investigations, and takes into consideration how effective a department is in solving its own problems.

But, he said, “You have departments that are so troubled that to sit back and wait, based on our experience, for them to address what are enormous problems is going to leave people with their rights violated for a long time before those problems are addressed.”

Mr. Wexler and others, however, said that for agencies with specific problems whose leaders are eager to make changes, a more collaborative approach might be cheaper and just as effective.

One such method was tried in Las Vegas last year after a series of local newspaper articles on officer-involved shootings over 20 years by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. The agency entered into a voluntary agreement with the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services Office, which offers technical assistance to police departments but has no enforcement power. The Police Department is putting in place the recommendations of the resulting 154-page report.

Still, said Dr. Walker, of the University of Nebraska, so many federal investigations have now been conducted that no American police department really has an excuse for engaging in practices that violate civil rights.

“In the year 2013, no police department should be in a position where it can be sued by the Justice Department,” he said. “The past records indicate what problems they need to be aware of and what to do about such problems if they have them.”

• If you are an LEO at a crime scene--out of uniform but with a gun in your hand--what could you do to protect yourself from a responding officer who might mistake you for a suspect? • From the perspective of an arriving uniformed responder in that situation, what is "the quickest, clearest thing" the out-of-uniform officer can do to inform you that he or she is a cop? • If you've actually been in such a face-off, how was it resolved?

These questions, paraphrased here, were key components of a survey conducted by the Force Science Institute to elicit officers' personal strategies for avoiding "confused identity" blue-on-blue disasters. Preliminary results were announced today by FSI's executive director, Dr. Bill Lewinski. "Ironically," he told Force Science News, "some of the methods many officers said they would rely on to prevent a mistaken-identity shooting aren't likely to work in some of the most common blue-on-blue confrontations. "Mistaken shootings of one officer by another are justifiably much talked about and much worried about in law enforcement. But much more scientific research is needed before we can reliably determine the best safety measures for addressing them. This survey is the first step on what promises to be a long, arduous, and complex mission of discovery that hopefully will guide training and save lives in the future." Questions & answers The survey pool consisted of more than 200 graduates of the Force Science Certification Course [Click here for course details.] who volunteered to complete a six-point online questionnaire about the type of blue-on-blue encounters in which identity confusion might occur. FSI staff then spent several months compiling, categorizing, and analyzing their answers. Here are the topics covered and the predominate responses: Q. As an armed off-duty, plainclothes, or undercover LEO engaged in an enforcement action, "what could you do to ensure your personal safety once [a uniformed] responding officer arrives on scene?" A. Listed first by nearly one-third of the officers--the largest single grouping--was to "verbally identify" themselves as an LEO. A somewhat lesser percentage said their top priority would be to comply to the uniformed officer's commands, while still fewer said their first action would have been "pre-emptive," such as notifying a dispatcher that they were in the area to put arriving officers on alert. Q. If you're a uniformed responding officer, "what is the quickest, clearest thing" an officer in civilian clothing "can do to inform you they are a cop?" A. Again, the most preferred response was verbal. About 70% said the challenged subject should use a "verbal cue to identify" him/herself, while 17% favored seeing some sort of "visual cue to identity," such as displaying a badge, a "color of the day," or giving a coded physical gesture. Q. "As the uniformed officer, what orders are you likely to give an individual who announces or communicates they are an off-duty or undercover LEO?" A. "Commands to gain weapon compliance [or] physical compliance" were given as first responses by nearly half and by about a third of the survey-takers respectively. Q. "If applicable, describe previous situations when you were first on the scene, wearing plainclothes and identifying yourself as an LEO to a responding, uniformed officer." A. The majority either did not answer or stated they had not been involved in such an incident. About one-fifth said they had been involved but their descriptions were too vague or incomplete to be properly parsed by the research team. About 12% were precise enough to report that they had been actively engaged with a suspect when uniformed officers arrived and that their gun was visible during at least part of the encounter. Of these, most said they had used visual cues (such as lowering their weapon) to successfully establish their law enforcement affiliation, while the rest had relied on verbal responses. Q. "If applicable, describe a previous situation when you came across an [unidentified] off-duty/undercover officer [in an enforcement situation] when you were on-duty." A. Nearly 40% of all of the respondents said they had been in this situation. Among those who answered in enough detail for their responses to be analyzed, the circumstances most often were related to drug enforcement, robbery/theft/burglary calls, traffic/felony stops, or man-with-a-gun reports. In about equal numbers, the unidentified officer was able to offer verbal or visual cues that satisfactorily established his or her law enforcement affiliation. In about one out of 10 of these confrontations, the uniformed officer had "received pre-emptive information," because either the plainclothes officer or a bystander had "called in a description" to alert arriving officers. In a sizeable number of other cases, the uniformed officer had "immediately" recognized the off-duty/undercover colleague as a personal acquaintance. Overall, however, in somewhat less than half the confrontations, identification had to be verified after "temporary detainment." Q. "What training have you had, if any, for handling this type of encounter?" A. Fewer than half of the survey-takers reported taking part in or instructing any type of formal training on blue-on-blue encounters, and about half of those had received classroom instruction only. Only a minority had experienced scenario or simulator exercises. Lewinski comments "This survey offers some important insights into law enforcement's current understanding of blue-on-blue dynamics," Lewinski says. "For instance, the responses underscore the importance of communication between the plainclothes, at-risk officer and the uniformed, challenging officer. Clearly verbal and visual cues are favored and do work in successfully resolving these dangerous confrontations--in some instances. "Specifically, they seem most likely to work when time, circumstances, and the proper frame of mind permit identifying information to be clearly transmitted and cognitively processed. But in many confusing encounters, those luxuries don't exist. "A combination of high stress, time compression, and seemingly threatening weapon movement by the unidentified officer may force a uniformed officer to make a snap judgment based on very limited information, and take immediate deadly action or risk his own life if he waits for more clarifying input. "Because of auditory suppression that can occur under urgent, intense stress, a challenging officer may not hear clearly what a challenged officer says. Because an unidentified officer, in his mindset, may consider himself 'part of the law enforcement team,' he may be puzzled by a uniformed officer's commands to drop his weapon and may not comply promptly. If a visual cue, like an unidentified officer's badge, is displayed on his front side, it will likely be missed by a uniformed officer approaching from the side or rear. "There are many real-life possibilities that commonly occur in blue-on-blue confrontations that can easily defeat 'logical' strategies that are contrived in calm, nonthreatening circumstances." [To see how human performance factors can play out to a tragic end, check our recent series, "The Anatomy of a 'Classic' Blue-on-Blue Shooting," Force Science News transmissions #233 & #234. The case analyzed involved issues of time urgency, auditory suppression, disparate mindsets, seemingly threatening weapon movement, forced decision-making, and other common influences. It was also a case in which the victim officer's clear identification of his law enforcement affiliation--his uniform--could not be seen at the time he was shot.] Dearth of meaningful research "Unfortunately," Lewinski says, "we don't know how to better address the blue-on-blue problem because there is so much we don't know about these confrontations. "Even some fundamental but important information for understanding the problem is missing. We know something about the circumstances in which most fatalities occur--the blue-on-blue failures--but we don't know the number of deaths or injuries that have been avoided and what has worked in resolving those incidents successfully. We don't know the circumstances and numbers where officers have been shot and wounded erroneously by other officers, or shot at and the shot missed. And we don't yet have the scientific data necessary to base training on much more than mere logic and anecdotal experience." Over the next year, FSI intends to formulate research projects to explore deeply the human dynamics of blue-on-blue encounters, Lewinski says. "In particular, we want to focus on the decision-making process: How can the thinking of 'target' officers and responders as well be influenced to better clarify rapidly unfolding but uncertain situations and avoid mistakes. "And we want to expand the knowledge base about officer-against-officer shootings. Identity confusion is only one kind of blue-on-blue event. There are also unintended discharges, slip-and-capture errors, and other training-related tragedies; incidents of cops themselves committing suicide by cop; cases where either the responder or the plainclothes officer is involved in criminal activity, and so on. All these involve human factors that cry out to be better understood." Move past classrooms Meanwhile, Lewinski emphasizes that training on blue-on-blue encounters needs to move beyond the classroom to force-on-force, role-playing scenarios. "This training needs to be experienced rather than intellectualized," he says. "The more you practice responding in crisis situations, the better you get at it." In blue-on-blue confrontations, "the heaviest burden really is on the unidentified officer," Lewinski explains. "Cops need to learn to change their mindset when they are in civilian clothes and to understand the dangerous position they place themselves in when they engage in enforcement activities in plainclothes. "They can no longer think and act as if they are an instantly recognizable part of the law enforcement team. They have to practice thinking of themselves as a responding uniformed officer may see them. That includes immediately yelling out their identity, complying promptly with commands, and consciously restraining their movements, particularly any inadvertent pointing of their weapon toward the challenging officer. "Responding officers, on the other hand, need to practice utilizing cover whenever possible in approaching uncertain situations. This may give them more time to pick up on cues to a target officer's identity and to analyze subtleties of the circumstances they're facing." [Principal research analysts on the blue-on-blue survey were Dawn Seefeldt and Nicole Stottlemyre. The study was supervised by FSI Project Director Bill Spence.] NEXT: Officers' gripping stories of how they survived blue-on-blue showdowns.

Detroit Police Response Times No Guide to EffectivenessFigures are clouded by lack of standardization

By CARL BIALIK

Among the many data points the city of Detroit offered in explaining its decision to declare bankruptcy last month, one was particularly eye-catching: Detroit police take an average of 58 minutes to respond to emergency calls, compared with a national average of 11 minutes.

But those figures, repeated by Michigan's governor on national television and in media reports around the country, say little about the effectiveness of the city's police, according to law-enforcement experts and former and current police chiefs, including Detroit's.

Detroit's police chief, James Craig, said one reason the stats make his officers seem so slow to arrive is that his department puts far more calls than other departments into the high-priority category—about 50%.

There is no standard way, they say, for cities to measure response times, which can vary according to many factors: how many calls are labeled high-priority and included in the average; whether unusually long waits for police response are tossed from the data set; whether the clock starts when a 911 call is answered by an operator or when the call is dispatched to the police; and whether officers check in promptly after arriving at a crime scene.

Even if response times were standardized, they wouldn't be the most important indicator of police performance, say law-enforcement scholars. The vast majority of calls—those when the crime has already been committed and the perpetrator has left the scene—don't require an immediate response. What matters more, according to several studies, is whether callers are given an accurate estimate of arrival time, and what officers accomplish when they do arrive.

And even more important than responding to calls are measures to stop crime happening in the first place, says Kevin Belk, chief of the Grand Rapids, Mich., police department. "Calls for service tend to make you a reactive department," Chief Belk said. "Where you can provide significant value is proactive methods."The Numbers Guy Blog

Giving No Time to Misleading Police Stats

Chief Belk and others who downplay response time nonetheless agree it is important to respond to urgent calls as quickly as possible. But it's not clear how much less successful Detroit is at that than other big cities. Detroit's police chief, James Craig, said one reason the stats make his officers seem so slow to arrive is that his department puts far more calls than other departments into the high-priority category—about 50%. He said his staff has examined the subset of calls that were true emergencies and found that response times last year averaged 15 minutes. He added that the time included the period between when the 911 call was answered and when it was assigned to a police unit, time that some departments don't count and that Detroit's won't count in the future.

"It's not that we want to play with the numbers," Chief Craig said. "It's just that we want to make sure we calculate it the same way everyone else does it."

Detroit's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder have compared the city's response times with a nationwide average of 11 minutes, but it's not clear where that figure comes from. A Snyder spokeswoman cited Mr. Orr's report to creditors, and an Orr spokesman didn't respond to a request to provide sources for the estimate. Law-enforcement scholars said they doubted a national average is available, given the dearth of standardized data.

This week, The Wall Street Journal asked police departments in the 25 most-populous U.S. cities for a variety of response-time stats. Fewer than half responded, and none kept a stat that several experts said would be more revealing than a straight average: the amount of time by which 90% of urgent calls are responded to. Those that responded gave numbers that didn't jibe with the national picture painted by Detroit officials. Police are arriving at urgent calls much sooner than 11 minutes—but those calls make up less than 10% of 911 calls in many departments.

For instance, police in Philadelphia, San Diego and Austin, Texas, typically arrive on the scene after urgent calls in about six minutes, but in each city fewer than 5% of calls are categorized as urgent. Police take longer on priority calls in San Francisco, Boston, Nashville and Fort Worth, Texas, but then each of those cities categorizes a greater proportion of calls as urgent—as high as 14% in Boston. And lower-priority calls can take much longer—44 minutes in Austin, 77 minutes in San Diego.

Darrel Stephens, a former police chief in four cities who is now executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, traces the focus on response times to a commission convened by President Lyndon B. Johnson, which reported on ways to professionalize policing, including measuring and minimizing response times. The commission studied nearly 2,000 crimes committed in January 1966 in Los Angeles, and found the average response time when arrests were made was 4.1 minutes, while the average when arrests weren't made was 6.3 minutes. Based on that finding, the commission recommended "that ways should be found of getting persons with investigative expertise to crime scenes with the greatest possible rapidity."

But Mr. Stephens said those data were flawed, because they included cases where officers weren't responding to calls but initiated contact when they saw a crime being committed. Those crimes both had zero response time and were the most likely to yield an arrest, but said little about the importance of responding quickly to a 911 call.

There are other data suggesting the Detroit police department is troubled. For instance, its clearance rate—the rate of laying a charge for a crime—is far below other Midwestern cities of similar size.

Clearance rate is one of many measures superior to response times, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "We measure police on a whole set of criteria—reduction of crime, prevention of crime, quality of service—as opposed to racing from one call to another," he said.

Not so much. Funny enough, a website with the above name might not be so evenhanded in it's coverage of law enforcement issues. The author of the piece claiming he was the taget of assassination attempts by the police administration tend to raise doubts about his credibility to me.

Police employ their Kevlar helmets, tactical vests, ballistic shields and armored vehicles when there is an identified heightened threat, not on regular patrol

Governor Mike Huckabee recently complained about the “militarization of law enforcement” on his Fox News program

Knowing the governor commuted the 75-year sentence of Maurice Clemmons made it difficult to watch as the governor questioned the need for police officers to wear “armor” and carry “assault weapons.”

The governor’s leniency allowed Clemmons the freedom to murder four police officers in Lakewood, Washington.

Police employ their Kevlar helmets, tactical vests, ballistic shields and armored vehicles when there is an identified heightened threat, not on regular patrol. (AP Image)

Police militarization and the Ethical WarriorThe public has nothing to fear from well-trained tactical teams made up of motivated Ethical Warriors.

Pre-Kevlar History Whenever members of the media use the term “militarization,” they are usually talking about armed tactical officers in Kevlar helmets and tactical armor performing “no-knock” warrants.

Most do not remember the days before such equipment and tactics, when the only thing to stop a bullet fired from a criminal was a Class A uniform shirt over the courageous heart of a police officer.

They probably long for the days when a chief or sheriff would disarm themselves during a standoff to conduct face-to-face negotiations with suspects. There were even cases where they traded themselves for hostages.

This approach led to the tragic death of Mequon, Wisconsin Chief Thomas Elroy Buntrock in 1979.

Not Militarized People who speak of “militarized” police ignore that on a daily basis police officers patrol in standard uniforms, wearing a standard issue semi-automatic handgun on their hip. Some choose to wear concealed body armor 24-7 (all should wear body armor of some kind). Officers arrive at the scene of the vast majority of calls for service driving marked patrol cars, not armored vehicles.

Sometimes patrolling in this manner leads officers to roll up to very dangerous situations ill-equipped and outgunned. An example of this was the North Hollywood shoot-out, where Los Angeles officers bravely stood their ground with 9mm handguns and shotguns against two heavily armed and armored bank robbers.

What Governor Huckabee failed to point out to his viewers was that police only don their Kevlar helmets and tactical vests, let alone deploy ballistic shields and armored vehicles, when there is an identified heightened threat.

Better Salesmanship When Kevlar was first released, there was push from within law enforcement to not discuss the use of vests with the public and the media. If criminals were constantly reminded of the fact that officers were wearing body armor, they would adjust their fire to thwart the armor, according to this thinking.

The cat is out of the bag — cops use Kevlar for protection — so we have to do a better job of selling the idea that Kevlar helmets, vests, and vehicles are safety equipment for especially dangerous situations.

Law enforcement should utilize the approach of fire departments. For years they have educated the public on the function, cost, and design of their equipment.

The public should be told that special equipment serves the same function as a hard hat at a construction site. Emphasis should be placed on the fact that it would be foolish to have available safety equipment such as this and not use it when facing known threats such as:

A Difficult Path One might notice that in the photo I have chosen for my “Blue Knights” column here on PoliceOne, I am wearing a Kevlar helmet, armed with a Heckler and Koch MP-5. I chose this photo because to me, it represents the dual role of the modern blue knight.

An officer must be just as capable with a reassuring smile as he/she is with his/her weapons. The fact is that any time an officer is displaying one when he/she should be displaying the other, that officer is going to suffer consequences.

Officers walk a difficult path. Some citizens are deserving of a handshake, others have earned handcuffs, and still others need to be covered with a handgun. Most of the time officers have no idea which one of these citizens they are facing on a call for service.

What Is Militarization? There are times, however, when officers know well that the person they have to arrest in a given location is armed and extremely dangerous. If you are assigned to make the arrest of this very dangerous individual and these three options are available, which would you choose?

1.) Park your marked squad in front and approach with your partner wearing the uniform of the day. Knock and announce yourself off to the side of the front door, while your partner covers the back.

2.) Put on your Kevlar helmet and tactical vest. Arm yourself with your M-4 and grab a ballistic shield and the chemical munitions with which you’ve trained. Approach in an armored vehicle, and have on hand a trained team of negotiators as well as tactical operators carrying a no-knock warrant.

3.) A targeted drone strike.

Option number one might seem the most appealing for the ordinary (and uninformed) citizen, but is tactically unsafe for the situation. This tactic would have been used by agencies in the 1960s and ‘70s, when officers were being killed in the line of duty at a truly alarming rate. Today, we know better.

Option number two has been made available to our modern blue knights in recent years to keep them safer in an unsafe profession. Using sound tactics, wearing appropriate protective equipment, and carrying firearms that can be shoulder-fired as well as a legally obtained no-knock search warrant is not militarization.

Option number three is militarization.

About the author Lt. Dan Marcou retired as a highly decorated police lieutenant and SWAT Commander with 33 years of full time law enforcement experience. He is a nationally recognized police trainer in many police disciplines and is a Master Trainer in the State of Wisconsin. He has authored three novels The Calling: The Making of a Veteran Cop , S.W.A.T. Blue Knights in Black Armor, and Nobody's Heroes are all available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com. Visit his website and contact Dan Marcou

In Utah, the police are on record in federal court applying the "Tueller Drill" or "21 foot rule" when a defender armed with a firearm is threatened by a person with an edged weapon. This could be an important record available to attorneys defending cases on the theory of self-defense when the "victim" was armed with a knife or other non-firearm weapon:

How can this be? Just lack of sleep can impair someone's ability to drive a car. Can someone be arrested for driving while too tired?

****Man blows 0.00 on breathalyzer, gets arrested for DWI

By Will Lerner 15 hours ago Odd News

Back in 2013, Texas resident Larry Davis ran either a red light or stop sign (reports vary) in his Buick in the city of Austin. Despite his insistence that he had had only one drink, he was put in handcuffs and arrested for driving while intoxicated. Then, when he was given a Breathalyzer test by the AustinPolice Department, he blew a 0.00. Nonetheless, as KVUE reports, Mr. Davis spent the night in jail.

While at the station, Mr. Davis agreed to give a blood sample as well, to prove he was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol. The results would later come back 100% negative. Davis’ attorney, Daniel Betts, told KVUE, “My reaction was just shock that this happened."

The Austin Police Department stands by the arrest, saying they believed Davis showed signs of impairment, that while standing on one leg, he “swayed,” and “needed his arms for balance.” They also suggested that he could have been on marijuana, a drug that wouldn’t necessarily show up in a test. The APD said they’re going by a “take-no-chances” policy. That being said, they did acknowledge how unusual it is that Davis was arrested despite registering a zero on his breath test.

Davis' attorney, Daniel Betts (KVUE)

The Statesman reports that people, including Davis’ attorney, Mr. Betts, have characterized Austin PD’s drunken driving arrests as “overzealous.” They noted back in 2011, that Austin’s Travis County has, “dismissed a higher percentage of drunken driving cases than other major Texas counties -- in part because prosecutors said police filed weak charges or prosecutors allowed suspects plead to other crimes."

As for Larry Davis, he will now spend the next few months getting his arrest record wiped clean. In addition to that, he will file a grievance against the Austin Police Department and the officer who arrested him. KVUE notes that as they started to investigate the manner, Travis County prosecutors dismissed the case completely.

There is a variation between states what the statutes are called. The key elements tend to be pretty similar.

1. Operated a motor vehicle (In some places, bicycles and horses and riding mowers and tractors all count. Check your state statute)

2. While ability was impaired by alcohol, or illegal drugs, or legal drugs, OTC, whatever combination. (If you drink some Nyquil for your flu and decide to drive across town 30 minutes later and bounce off a curb in front of a marked unit, there could be problems aside from your illness).

3. The amount of alcohol detected in your system may or may not exceed the presumptive range in the statute, that doen't mean you were not in violation of the law. As an example, a 16 yr old girl who weighs 100 pounds and never drank alcohol before might be visibly impaired after half a wine cooler.

4. The time from the arrest to when the subject actually provides the breath or blood sample may be hours. There are sometimes unavoidable delays. Like no one able to assist as you inventory a 1978 Chevy suburban that a homeless guy has been living in for an extended period. You've got to complete the inventory before you can have the vehicle towed. Otherwise you and the dept. are on the hook for him to claim that his cash and valuables were stolen.

5. Probable cause doesn't mean guilty. It means a reasonable belief based on the totality of the circumstances that a crime was, is or is about to be committed. An officer can act in good faith and reasonably arrest someone who is actually innocent. That's why we have courts.

Are you an officer who has been involved in use-of-force hearings or litigation, or are you an attorney who represents LEOs when their force decisions are reviewed or challenged?

If so, we'd like to hear your views on how an officer can best help a lawyer in preparing the strongest defense possible after an OIS or other major force confrontation. What, in your experience, are key do's and don'ts of working with an attorney to get a justified, favorable resolution?

To stimulate responses, Force Science News put that issue recently to Heather White, a Salt Lake City police liability attorney. White is a graduate of the Force Science certification course, and a past president of the Utah chapter of the Federal Bar Assn.

Here are six tips she offers after nearly 20 years of defending officers in federal civil rights/excessive force lawsuits. Note that some suggestions have to do with your actions before a lawyer is even involved.

DETAIL YOUR TRAINING. "It's important to educate your lawyer, in detail, about what you were trained to do, how you were trained to do it, and why you did it in the circumstances you faced," White says. "This helps the attorney talk about the 'objective standard' behind your actions in a way that judges and jurors can understand." Example: An officer standing with a DUI suspect outside a pickup truck suddenly performed a foot sweep that tumbled the driver to the ground. "On the dash-cam video, it looked like the officer just walked up and dumped the guy," White says.

What the camera didn't show was the offender tensing up when the officer touched his shoulder, then starting to lurch back toward the cab. The officer explained, from his training and experience, about the danger cues of certain body language and the potential risk of the suspect reaching a weapon inside the truck--concepts the average naive juror wouldn't think of.

"Being able to show that officers are trained to see and react to things differently from civilians helps jurors accept that in that situation, they would have done the same thing," White says.

DROP YOUR FACADE. "It's very important for judges and juries to see an officer who has been in a shooting as a human being and not just a robotic force," White says. She urges clients to "take off the emotionless professional facade" and express their feelings to her honestly. "I want to know how they feel after the act and what emotion went through their mind just before they shot, when they thought they were about to be separated from their family forever or realized they were about to take a human life."

Some are "sad, even weepy," others angry about having been forced into a him-or-me choice. "Whatever their genuine emotions, a good attorney can work with it in court to humanize the officer and counter the media image of cops as people who like guns and like being aggressive. Digging through the tough mental armor can help build the picture of an officer who didn't take a necessary decision to shoot lightly."

LEAVE WIGGLE ROOM. "When describing your shooting, in your statement or in testimony, leave a little bit of room for error. This is critical," White says. "Rather than being too specific about times, distances, and other factors that can be measured independently and also compared to the testimony of other witnesses, its usually best to avoid absolutes. Forensics may prove you and your certainties wrong.

"When life-threatening events happen as fast and under as much stress as most shootings, it's usually impossible to register all details with precision. So it's really more accurate to describe what you thought you saw or experienced--how things seemed to be from your unique perspective. "When you don't lock your attorney into rigid specifics, you make it easier to introduce human limitations of perception and memory and to address or avoid potential inconsistencies."

THINK AHEAD. Evaluate what you say and do at the scene of a confrontation in terms of "whether you'd like to see it replayed on a big screen in a federal court house," White advises.

Example: A woman who had tried to help her husband escape from police was handcuffed in the back of a patrol car. In conversation with an officer, she became highly agitated and belligerent, baiting him at one point by asking: "What are you gonna do, stomp on me?"

"No," the officer replied, "I'm gonna smash you in the face!"

"He was being sarcastic," White explains, "but what he said was captured on the audio of a back-facing camera." In court, "this didn't play well to the jury," and gave White as the officer's attorney a problem of "unprofessional conduct" to deal with that distracted from the core of the case.

"The officer could have prevented that by simply ignoring her," White says.

When circumstances permit, White strongly favors explaining to subjects why you are instructing or asking them to do things rather than simply ordering them to comply. "In litigation, this can be helpful to have recorded," she says. "If you're able to explain as you go along why you're asking or doing something, it helps the jury understand your thinking and your actions.

"Of course, don't compromise your safety by talking when you should be acting immediately. Officer safety is paramount. But when possible, explaining creates better rapport and tends to give you more credibility with a jury."

NAIL WITNESSES ASAP. "Never underestimate the value of getting statements from witnesses right away, before they have a chance to fabricate things to suit their biases," White says. "The sooner you get even an informal preliminary statement, the less tainted it's likely to be."

Example: When a long pursuit of a stolen truck through multiple jurisdictions finally ended in the barnyard of the suspect's own rural residence, the driver hopped from the cab and started walking toward an open field. "As officers came after him, he suddenly whirled around in a shooting stance, with an object in his hand," White recalls. Without hesitation, two officers fired at the subject and killed him.

"Turned out he was not holding a gun," White says. "He was pressing a knife against his wrist."

As the smoke cleared, a county officer immediately approached a man who'd been working on a truck in the yard and asked him what he'd seen. He wrote down the man's exact words: "I even thought he had a gun."

The witness was the suspect's brother-in-law. Later when the family filed a suit claiming that the shooters should have known the suspect was not brandishing a gun and posed no urgent threat, "the statement was critical to the jury's determination that the officers were justified in shooting," White says.

If you're a shooting officer at a scene, your involvement with witnesses will likely not be practical or desirable. "But often," she says, "there are other officers present who can readily take up this important task."

These brief tips are a just few of many that could be offered. Let us know what you'd like to share about working successfully with attorneys at: training@forcescience.org